As an independent artist, it’s frustrating to be stuck and broke. You find yourself wondering why others are successful and where all the money is hidden. Yeah I know, it’s really all about the music, but the reality is you need money to operate your business and invest in your future.

In my continuing Mini Series, I reveal tools and specific strategies you can implement to create multiple revenue streams and cash flow for your music. Discover two crowdfunding platforms you can use to support your art and make your musical cash register ring again and again. 2015 can be your best year ever!

Thanks for all of your comments and encouragement. I absolutely love hearing what you’re thinking, so please be sure to leave a comment or question below today’s video. Someone will be very happy that they did.

PLEASE – If you know anyone else who might benefit from watching this Mini Series on the music business, please share this post with them.

I hope you are enjoying my new Mini Series on the music business. It’s truly amazing how in the first video you saw the Steel Blossoms from Nashville and Colin Huntley from Texas applying my strategies to turn their passions into a career.

These musicians are just like you. They started with a small following and have grown their audience and income by investing in strategies and success one step at a time.

In this second video of the free Mini Series, I reveal how you can create rewarding EXPERIENCES your fans will crave and actually PAY you for. Discover unforgettable connections you can offer to your fans RIGHT NOW to set yourself apart from the crowd.

You will meet Shannon Curtis, a recent New Artist Model member who has perfected the art of the house concert and put $25,000 in her bank account in just two months time. See first hand how she did it and exactly how you can do it too.

Do have a base of loyal fans for your music? Building a community of fans and super fans is the #1 thing you can do to enhance your music career. This is critical to your success. Let me show you how.

In this new Mini Series I address the biggest problems that independent artists, songwriters, DJs and producers face and walk you through practical solutions that you can start applying to your music career TODAY.

The first video starts with Fan Engagement. I’m going to show you how to create communities of Fans and Super Fans that will support you for years.

I have been helping hundreds of musicians discover what has been holding them back from success. Don’t get trapped by your own frustrations, I can help you break through.

In this video I introduce you to two of my star New Artist Model Members Hayley and Sara from the Steel Blossoms, who are using these techniques to build a community of Super Fans with social media. I also show you how to build a killer online presence for yourself.

Inside this Mini Series I reveal the proven strategies I have been teaching my members and clients.

Discover:

How to create Communities of Fans and Super Fans

How to develop Experiences that your Fans will Crave and Pay You for

How to make Money in Music and Monetize your Audience Again and Again

How to uncover Opportunities via Power Networking

How to unlock Multiple Revenue Streams to support Your Career

How to get your audience to go from “Free” to “Paid”

Plus much, much more…

This is the best time in history to be a creative person, and I promise to do everything I can to help you eliminate any obstacles that are in the way of you achieving your dreams.

P.S. PLEASE – If you know anyone else who might benefit from this Mini Series on the music business, please share this post with them. Everyone deserves a chance at success and they will thank you for sharing!

We all listen to and discover music differently, and it’s certainly interesting from a business and marketing standpoint to know how people interact with music in different locations. This infographic is from Nielson.

How do you listen to and discover music? Let me know in the comments below.

St. Vincent’s recent album was released February 25. In the first week, 29,506 copies were sold – double that of the previous release. St. Vincent worked with Found Group for the digital campaign. The Found Group used their found.ee tool to form retargeting pools that allow them to reconnect with fans, constantly dishing them new content to keep them engaged.

Check out this info graphic that details the Found Group‘s digital strategy for the St. Vincent release. This info graphic was originally from Digital Music News. To get more detail on the strategy and the info graphic, visit Digital Music News.

Richard Levin, former president of Yale University, was named head of the online education company Coursera in March. Coursera’s users number in the millions and it was one of the first major players in the MOOC environment.

Find out Levin’s thoughts on Coursera and his plans for the future in this interview from the New York Times. This is just an excerpt, but you can read the full interview over on the New York Time’s website.

Q. Why is the former president of Yale going to a technology company?

A. We may differ in our views. The technology is obviously incredibly important, but what really makes this interesting for me is this capacity to expand the mission of our great universities, both in the United States and abroad, to reach audiences that don’t have access to higher education otherwise.

Q. Yale has not exactly been a mass institution.

A. No, but we were early in the on-line arena, with a venture back in 2000 called All-Learn.

Q. How much did you lose, and why didn’t that spoil this for you?

A. It was too early. Bandwidth wasn’t adequate to support the video. But we gained a lot of experience of how to create courses, and then we used it starting in 2007 to create very high quality videos, now supported by adequate bandwidth in many parts of the world, with the Open Yale courses. We’ve released over 40 of them, and they gained a wide audience.

But Coursera, by being an aggregator and having attracted so many universities, means that the traffic that flows to these courses is far larger. A couple of courses that have been on the Open Yale website we’ve repurposed as Coursera courses this year.

Q. How do you see the landscape of MOOCs — now and going forward?

A. Many schools started in this because they thought they could do something to improve their on-campus experience — by using on-line lectures to give students background, and then have them come in the so-called flipped classroom and have more active engagement with the instructor.

That’s a great thing. But to me that’s like saying that the purpose of movies is to film theater productions. It’s missing the fact that we have a new medium now. Films today don’t look like film versions of stage productions.

You’re now talking about extended student bodies that are numbering in the hundreds of thousands potentially, for most of our partners, whereas their campuses are in the tens of thousands. And within a few years it’s going to be in the millions, per school.

That’s what got me interested. If this were just about the flipped classroom I wouldn’t have decided to take this plunge. I see a completely new set of opportunities opening up for universities — and for individuals.

Q. You’re an economist. How do you get from here to there?

A. Right now courses are free and we’re charging for certification. We think that as the idea of using Coursera courses for professional advancement grows, the numbers seeking certificates will grow. And the price we charge probably can grow, too. A move from $50 or $60 for Signature Track to $100 is certainly imaginable. At $100 a pop, if you had two or three, or five million people. …

Q. When you start charging more, and people expect more from their certificates, won’t differentiation between partners be more of a factor?

A. There’s no doubt that the number of student enrollments — and the capacity to produce revenue — is going to vary across our institutions.

Q. Right now your target audience is not people who want college credits. Do you think that will change?

A. I think there’s going to be innovation in every dimension. You’re going to see some of the Coursera partners offer credit for courses. I think that’s bound to happen.

The music industry is a hard business to break into. This article is from Ariel Hyatt of Cyber PR. It raises a lot of good points about getting a job in the music industry. Here’s a short excerpt, but you can see the full article over on the Cyber PR Blog.

Step 1: Identify Your Ares of Interest

Search your mind. Ask yourself what part of the music business do you want to be in? Is it working at a label, a radio station, a publicity firm, an online marketing company, in touring, or digital distribution? You may not know the answer to this question yet and that’s alright. You are not supposed to know until you get some experience in a particular area. BUT if you don’t specify what you are looking to try, the people in charge of hiring you will have NO CLUE where you will fit or how they can fit you into their business. So having a list of general areas of interest is a necessity.

Here are two suggestions to help you get a working knowledge of what different parts of the music industry are available:

1. Read music business related websites like Hypebot & Music Think Tank and start reading articles and news. There are countless articles available advising musicians and marketers on how do tackle their own careers. If the articles resonate with you and seem interesting than you have found a good match.

Research as much as you can in your chosen field. Again, think like a musician. There are a million resources available for musicians that list companies that help support them, and they all have websites that clearly show what they do and who their clients are.

Step 2: Make Your Dream List of Companies & Artists

If you love a specific band or artist, look up who they work with and put those companies on your list because nothing is more thrilling and satisfying than working for your favorite artists and bands (I still get a thrill out of that and I’ve been working in the music industry for 19 years).

Step 3:Rock Your Resume

Next, create the best resume you can put together. There are many websites, books, and even your career counseling office at school that can instruct you on how to do this so I’m not going to get into much detail here. But please heed this advice:

Be Concise – One page only

Be Detailed – What exactly did you do at the previous jobs that you list? These should express your talents.

Be Interesting – Include personal touches and hobbies or special interests.

Be Social - On your resume don’t forget to mention how many followers you have on Twitter, Facebook, and which music promotion social media sites you know how to use Last FM, ReverbNation, etc.

TIP: The music business tends to be informal, so you have some room to play with your resume and make your personality shine through more than you would on a “corporate” resume.

Data is becoming increasingly important in the music industry. Many streaming services rely on it to power their music recommendations and some companies are even using data to try to predict the next big thing in music. However, with something as personal as music, is more reliance on data always a good thing?

When I log on to Spotify, it recommends I listen to T. Rex because I listened to Marc Bolan. Bolan is the frontman of T. Rex. I roll my eyes and click away.

Recommendation algorithms increasingly suggest everything we may want to watch, read or buy; who to follow on Twitter, what New York Times article to read next or what home goods products to order from Amazon.

What happens when that logic is applied to something as personal, unexplainable and previously unquantifiable as music?

Data is trendy right now, and the music industry is catching on. Samsung just launched a mobile personalized radio app called Milk, Lyor Cohen is tapping Twitter metrics, Gracenote is analyzing BitTorrent data and Warner Music inked a label deal with Shazam. A forthcoming Cone speaker promises to really get to know you by using contextual information like what room you are in and the time of day to tell you exactly what it thinks you want to hear.

It’s not a totally new concept. Pandora’s genome project was first launched in 2000 to analyze and catalog a web of musical attributes. Apple launched its Genius feature in iTunes in 2008 using purchase history to recommend what you might like. Most digital music services today come with suggested artists and some sort of auto play function — and most of those services are, or were, being powered by Echo Nest data. But as the T. Rex example shows, music recomendation is not an exact science yet.

In a conversation after his presentation, Whitman likened what the Echo Nest does to Google search, “It’s a way to browse and discover things. It’s like a Google search — we’re not forcing anything on you, its a way to explore.”

As streaming services like Beats, Spotify and Rdio offer essentially the same catalogue of music, with a few notable exceptions, the real differentiation factor between services is going to be the user experience and the quality of those recommendations.

Because most casual music listeners want an easy button, like a radio dial, that provides a finite number of options rather than a seemingly infinite flood of choice. As the Echo Nest’s director of developer platforms Paul Lamere said at SXSW: “You have to find a way to engage the people that are going to be intimated by a search box [sitting] in front of 30 million songs.” Humans tend to prefer to lean back and trust what a computer suggests as correct, that’s why three-fourths of all viewer choices on Netflix are from the recommendations on the home screen.

“Taste profile is a huge portion of the Echo Nest business these days. We are tracking tens of millions of people’s music listening history on our systems. This powers all of our personalization, so when you log on to one of the services that use the Echo Nest Taste Profile, they’ll know about you right away. They’ll say ‘Well I know this person, what kind of music they like and what kind of stuff they want to listen to in the morning.’ If sometimes they listen to kids music, thats a different thing than listening to metal music another time of the day.”

With all this data to crunch and tastes to triangulate, what about human reccomendation?

Though there is no data point for musical serendipity, there may be a sweet spot between rockism (humans) and technological determinism (computers) when considering algorithmic discovery. It can be easy to frame the choice as human versus machine, but those algorithms were created by humans, for humans. A computer-generated recommendation is not necessarily always better than a human’s, but perhaps better than a human mind alone. People ultimately care about the music, not the technology that delivers it.

Do you think computer recommendation is a good thing in music? Do you see a trend towards more human recommendation?